In the quickly changing, highly competitive world of electronics industry, electronic devices have been developed rapidly with more and more functions, resulting in increased power demand. As a result, a single system often has more than one heat-generating components. In the prevailing trend of electronic device minimization, heat dissipation for heat-generating components in a confined space becomes a problem waiting to be solved.
For instance, a laptop or a personal computer may comprise a CPU (central processing unit) and other electronic components such as a video card and the like. It is common to have two or many heat-generating components in a computer or in a workstation; however, if the heat cannot be dissipated, it may burn the internal circuit in a chip and eventually lead to a destructive breakdown of the whole electronic system. Therefore, it is desirable to set a product goal in dissipating as much heat as possible in the smallest space, so that the heat-generating components can be operated smoothly and reliably under an adequate environment.
For example, a typical interface card (such as a video card) in a laptop comprises many semiconductor chips including active components and/or passive components such as a capacitor, a resistor, and an inductor. In order to effectively dissipate the heat generated during operation of the semiconductor chips in the interface card, the semiconductor chips are usually connected to a surface of the interface card through electrical terminals such as pins, and then a thermal conductive gel is applied on an inactive surface of the semiconductor chip for attaching a heat dissipating unit such as a fin thereto so as to dissipate the heat generated by the chip during its operation. Furthermore, typically a fan is further employed to dissipate the heat generated by various electronic components during their operation for improving the overall heat dissipating efficiency of the electronic components formed in the laptop.
The ever-growing demand of an slim and minimized electronic device leads to a trend of developing a thinner and lighter laptop; however, if a fin with a certain thickness is provided for the semiconductor chip of the interface card, the overall thickness of the system would increase and therefore would not satisfy the tendency of lighter and thinner laptop. Moreover, if the interface cards provided in a laptop include a video card, a sound card and a peripheral interface card, attaching fins to the semiconductor chips of each interface card respectively may result in an increase in production cost.
Thereby, under the consideration of minimization of the electronic devices within a confined space, the problem that urgently needs to be solved is how to effectively provide heat dissipation for an interface card in an electronic device.